


rules of the universe

by astrolesbian



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-11
Updated: 2016-04-11
Packaged: 2018-06-01 14:20:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6523645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astrolesbian/pseuds/astrolesbian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Haplessly, hauntingly, the town keeps drawing them together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	rules of the universe

Carlos comes to the town of Night Vale when he is thirty-one and three-quarters, and still measuring time in concrete blocks of years and months and hours and days, still experiencing time as a linear movement, from here to there and on into forever. Carlos comes to Night Vale because no one else will, and home has been a little too quiet after his family all went their separate ways and moved on to other towns to live soft, linear lives. Carlos comes to Night Vale because he ran away from home once when he was ten years old, and ever since, he has been good at running. Carlos comes to Night Vale because it is a beautiful mess of science and magic and things you have to take on faith, but still more things that can be studied and explained and _known,_ and Carlos loves that part of his job — the _knowing,_ like endlessness, like constants of the universe, like time.

 

But most of all, Carlos comes to Night Vale because he feels, calmly and quietly and screamingly, like Night Vale wants him there.

 

He does not know what this means, but he is eager to find out.

 

-

 

He first sees Cecil Palmer at the press conference he calls to explain why he’s here, after he’s told by a lab assistant that it is the thing to do when one is a newcomer. He asks why, and the assistant doesn’t answer. Instead, he gains the assistant’s name — Alicia — which is most likely more valuable information.

 

Cecil Palmer is soft around the eyes and the jaw and sharp in the cheekbones and the shoulders. He is wearing a silver button-down and pinstriped pants, and his hair is thick and dark and tied into a loose braid that hangs over one shoulder. His skin is brown, and despite the smile lines around his eyes and the frown lines on his forehead, his cheeks and chin are stubble-free, like a ten-year-old’s. 

 

Carlos meets him when he extends a microphone, and asks Carlos’s name.

 

Carlos gives it, and Cecil repeats it, turning it around in his mouth like a slowly melting chocolate, making it sound hauntingly beautiful in a way Carlos had never thought his own name could sound. Then Cecil smiles, and it’s unexplainable, unknowable. Carlos does not have words or scientific terms for what that quiet smile does to his insides.

 

He mumbles an excuse and heads back to the lab, and thinks, for minutes, ages, lifetimes — _Cecil Palmer, Cecil Palmer, Cecil Palmer —_ and time isn’t real, in Night Vale, and so he must have spent all the time in the world remembering Cecil’s smile, and the way he held Carlos’s name in his mouth like it meant something grand and unexplainable, and Carlos decides that before he tries anything here, he needs to know the rules. There are always rules. All the basic laws of the universe are based on simple rules.

 

For example, _time is real and linear._ A rule.

 

Night Vale seems good at breaking rules, so Carlos will just have to figure out new ones. And Cecil —

 

Cecil had given him his number, and said _let me know if I can help, with anything,_ and Carlos had said _okay, thank you, I appreciate it,_ just to see Cecil’s smile like a sunburst all over again —

 

So he goes to Cecil, and asks for help.

 

And Cecil jumps in excitement, and almost spills his coffee, and mutters, _oh, drat,_ and it’s so endlessly endearing, and Carlos almost wants to —

 

But no, there are rules, and Carlos needs rules the way time isn’t real and neither are angels and no humans are allowed in the Dog Park. Carlos needs rules to survive, needs to know what he can work with in order to figure out the rest of the universe, needs to have something to fall back on when the world spins around him. And Cecil is there, and smiling, and Carlos hopes Cecil will wait a while, until he knows the rules, until he can understand Night Vale the way he used to understand the rest of the world. 

 

So he smiles, and says thank you, and calls — not for personal reasons, of course. And he thinks — hopes — that Cecil understands, that Carlos needs time, and rules, and neither of those things are in abundance in Night Vale.

 

And he needs, most of all, to explain to himself why he came — why he came to Night Vale when no one else has ever done it on purpose, why he feels so certainly that Night Vale wants him to be right where he is, sleeping in his lab next to Big Rico’s and smiling at Cecil’s honeyed voice over the radio, the only soft thing in a universe of rude awakenings. 

 

And Cecil stays, constant, in his ears and in his eyes, still smiling that sunburst smile and reporting on the news and wearing weird, crazy, beautiful clothes, his hair braided over his shoulder; complaining about the Apache Tracker, hating Steve Carlsberg, and saying _Carlos_ like it’s more than a word or a name, like it’s endless enough to rival time and space and love, and Carlos smiles every time he hears it, and keeps looking for rules and solutions.

 

-

 

He _understands,_ he tells the people in Teddy Williams’ militia, he _understands,_ it was all explainable, it was all a rule, all along. The town was not a vast, underground city, it was a very small city. There is no threat, he has figured it out, he _understands_ — and it seems like it might be the piece he has been missing, that this will help him make sense of everything else in Night Vale, that this will help him make sense of himself and his lab and the house that doesn’t exist and hooded figures and angels and it all, suddenly, feels so close —

 

Then there is a stabbing pain in his side and he looks down to see a spear the size of a fork sticking out of his stomach, and there’s Cecil’s voice on the radio, saying something, and he tries to listen, but more spears are hitting him, and he falls to one knee, and Cecil’s voice is very, very far away, and he thinks — what use is this, what use is _knowing,_ when I won’t see him if something happens to me —

 

There’s a noise, a shout, and Carlos can’t see, and he thinks, _I was wrong, I didn’t understand, not yet, not yet,_ and it drills at his brain like a woodpecker until he sees stars.

 

-

 

He wakes up with his body throbbing and a public service announcement about science from the radio, _existence is tricky, the scientists say,_ it goes, and he tries to sit up and breathes out a sob, and there’s a hand at his back, helping him lay back down.

 

_Existence is tricky,_ he thinks, and he still does not understand, and he considers being crushed by it, by the overwhelming and unintelligible facts of existence, facts that he does not understand, but he can hear the announcement on the radio ending, and Cecil is saying something soft and disbelieving, and he things — _that’s wrong,_ he thinks, _Cecil should understand._ But Cecil does not understand, and he tries to listen, and he hears _he’s okay, Carlos is okay,_ and he thinks — that’s not right, he is _not_ okay —

 

But Cecil is weeping in relief, and saying _he’s okay, Carlos is okay,_ and Carlos sits up, ignoring the ache in his sides, and listens to that sound. It is the sound, he thinks, of existence. Cecil is weeping because Carlos exists, and because for a moment, Cecil had thought he hadn’t. Cecil is weeping, because Carlos is okay. 

 

He fumbles for his phone.

 

_Can you meet me at the Arby’s, in the parking lot,_ he writes. _It’s important._

 

He writes the message because he thinks that finally, he understands.

 

-

 

Cecil looks at him, his eyes big and soft, his face still slightly tear-streaked, and Carlos pats his hand on the car’s trunk, and Cecil hesitantly moves to sit next to him.

 

_What’s wrong,_ Cecil says, _what matter needs our attention, what part of town needs saving,_ and Carlos shakes his head, and says _nothing, Cecil, after everything that happened, I just wanted to see you,_ because he did, and the words spill out, clumsy and uninhibited, and he doesn’t know how to tell Cecil everything: to tell him he was searching for rules and understanding in a place with no meaning and no logic, and that he understands now, somehow, suddenly. 

 

He understands Night Vale, and he understands existence, and time, and space, and he understands that he will never understand any of it. And he understands that none of this matters. The rules he used to live by do not matter anymore, because time is not linear or real, and existence is tricky, and simple facts of the universe are not simple in Night Vale. He has been searching for something that doesn’t exist, at least not here, in this place. But it doesn’t matter. It hasn’t mattered for a year.

 

He doesn’t say all that. He says, _I used to think it was setting at the wrong time, but then I realized that time doesn’t work in Night Vale, and that none of the clocks are real. Sometimes things seem so strange, or malevolent, and then you find that, underneath, it was something else altogether. Something pure, and innocent._

 

And Cecil’s eyes widen, and his voice trembles when he says _I know what you mean._

 

And Carlos reaches out, and puts his hand on Cecil’s knee, and Cecil leans forward, against his shoulder, and Carlos closes his eyes, for a moment. Cecil’s braid of hair is very soft, and the knitted poncho he’s wearing is like a blanket, draping over both of them and keeping them warm. 

 

Carlos opens his eyes again, and says, _thank you for coming._

 

Cecil smiles at him, and it’s that same sunburst smile that Cecil gave him when they first met, and he says, _thank you, Carlos, for wanting me here._

 

Carlos listens to Cecil say his name, so soft and so delicate and so kind, even _loving_. 

 

And he suddenly realizes that this is the rule he has been searching for — that everything else is background noise. That throughout this year, this long year of searching, haplessly, hauntingly, the town keeps drawing them together.

 

He understands, and here is Cecil, sitting on the trunk of Carlos’s car with his head on Carlos’s shoulder. He thinks of what he could say, right now, that would make the moment perfect, that would explain everything to Cecil in simple, kind words, how to say _I was waiting for you, but I didn’t realize it, I’ve only just realized it now,_ but he doesn’t say anything. Cecil sighs and leans in closer, and Carlos looks at the lights above the Arby’s, and he thinks, with fierceness and joy and even, maybe, love: _I understand, I understand, I understand._

 

**Author's Note:**

> so i fell out of listening to wtnv for a while, and decided a couple weeks ago to re-listen to all of it in order to catch up. i forgot how much i loved cecil and carlos, and their relationship, and carlos's sweet dorkyness. this was mostly written in an attempt to get into carlos's head a little and kind of explore how coming to night vale, a place where even time isn't real, might affect a really science minded person who relies on rules to shape his understanding of the world. 
> 
> people have probably already written this fic and done it better than i did, but i don't care. i had fun.
> 
> also: carlos is obviously latino, and i headcanon cecil as native american.


End file.
